Year: 2014

The YouTube Analytics API lets you retrieve viewing statistics, popularity metrics, and demographic information for YouTube videos and channels. Its an excellent way to analyze brand activity, likes and dislikes on YouTube. Power Query for Excel enables an easy way to acquire & transform the data for analysis. Power View for Excel is an excellent…

Its been interesting learning about the various implementations and solutions using Machine Learning in Retail over the last few months since we released Azure ML. The implementation for Pier 1 Imports, by Max451, is one of my favorites. Operating over 1,000 stores, Pier 1 Imports aims to be their customers’ neighborhood store for furniture and…

New airplanes like the Boeing 787 and the Airbus 350 XWB are incredibly connected and generate terabytes of data per flight. Virgin Atlantic is preparing for a significant increase in data as it embraces the internet of things, with a new fleet of highly connected planes each expected to create over half a terabyte of…

I was looking at a recent article which provided data visualizations that were rather difficult to understand and analyze. Here is the Washington Post article that I refer to: LINK. This set me thinking about how interactive visualizations empower the reader to engage with the visualization to better understand the data as well as make…

The BestBuy Developer APIs provides interesting product, store, category and customer review data that can be queried using Power Query for Excel. To signup for an API Key go to: https://developer.bestbuy.com/ I decided to test out the API using Power Query for Excel and try to build out some visualizations using Power View and Power…

One of the interesting announcements that came out of Strata+Hadoop World last week was the new machine learning (ML) capabilities in the Azure Marketplace. Not only can data scientists build models and publish it as a webservice, but they can also share it with the rest of the world via the Azure Marketplace. The Azure…

I stumbled upon an interesting application called Kimono that lets you convert data available on any website to an API. One you define what data you want to extract from a page and make it available as an API that returns JSON, you can then use Power Query to pull data into Excel and do…

LinkedIn is another source of data for some interesting data analytics using Power BI. The LinkedIn APIs enable you to access a lot of the LinkedIn data. I have found the easiest way to generate the query string for Power Query is by using the API Console from Apigee.com. A quick example that I tried…

Retailers operate in an environment that demands real-time data to make decisions about churn, spending patterns, share of wallet, cross-selling and up-selling. The ability to harness both internal as well as third party data enables more informed decisions particularly in increasing customer satisfaction and revenue. This is a compilation of Big Data Analytics stories in…